Eleven months

It’s been a big month. About three weeks ago, Michael said to me – you’d better start writing that post now, or you’ll forget things. I didn’t start writing it then. But I will try to remember. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but even four weeks ago you just seemed different. Older. More deliberate in your interactions. And then everything started coming together.

You have learnt to feed yourself with a spoon, with great concentration and determination, and hysterical tears if we interrupt you. You’ve got the basic motion sorted out and are very good at putting the spoon in your mouth, but you haven’t managed to get too much food onto it yet.

You’ve started waving and saying ‘bye bye’. You don’t do it very often, but it is just about the cutest thing in the whole world.You’ve started pointing at absolutely everything. You also point when you want something, like blueberries, or water, or my drink (after becoming bored with your own!). You had your first Christmas and thoroughly enjoyed it. My family showered you with presents.

‘Dardle ardle’ is still your favourite sound, and sometimes you use it as a greeting. You babble almost constantly and try pretty hard to imitate our words. Mum reckons you have at least five words already – ‘bye bye’, ‘door’, a garbled version of ‘hello’, ‘da’ for ‘there’, and ‘dadda’, which is morphing into ‘daddy’.

It’s been so much fun watching you work out how to crawl. You were on the brink of it for so long, and were getting pretty frustrated. But you just started leaning further and further out onto your hands (when you were sitting up), eventually tipping over onto your knees. After a few face-plants you got the hang of this. For a long time you’d be up on one knee with your other foot in front, so you couldn’t get anywhere. Then you got over properly, and spent about one day wobbling back and forth on your knees before you gathered the courage to take little crawling steps. Just amazing. It’s a pretty big shift to go from virtually stationary to being the master of your own movement throughout the world! It took you a while to work out that you can actually crawl to places. You started off by throwing a toy a couple of feet away and crawling off to get it – expanding your little realm through slowly increasing circles of movement. Now however you’ve realised you can go wherever you like which delights you.

To cap of your crawling skills you have mastered clapping, just out of the blue! You are so pleased with yourself. You clap when we say ‘clap’, you clap when we say ‘clever boy’, and you clap when you want to entertain us. Your eyes light up, you beam at us, and you clap clap clap!

My mother told me years ago that crawling seems somehow to be correlated to developing reading skills–as in, people who crawled for good long periods of time as babies also turn out to be strong readers. I don’t know whether that correlation still stands, and I also know that correlation isn’t causation. But still–crawling is exciting!

they do still say that but i’m not sure myself… my mum never crawled and she is certainly what you call a strong reader! but it is absolutely brilliant seeing him scooting around and he is much happier because of it.